Influential former aide voices concern on drone strikes

New York Times

Published 8:26 pm, Thursday, March 21, 2013

CHICAGO — A former top adviser to President Barack Obama on Thursday expressed concern about “blowback” from the aggressive U.S. campaign of drone strikes, warning that they could be undermining long-term efforts to battle extremism.

Gen. James Cartwright is the latest and perhaps most influential former member of Obama's national security team to express concerns that the costs of the strikes might be beginning to outweigh the benefits. But Cartwright, a former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a favored adviser during the president's first term, also expressed skepticism about a draft administration proposal to gradually shift drone operations from the CIA to the Pentagon.

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Under the proposal, two U.S. officials said, the Defense Department would gradually assume control over drone operations outside Pakistan. The officials said Obama had not yet made a decision about the proposal.

Because it would probably leave drone operations in Pakistan under the CIA, the practical effect of such a move in the short term would appear to be limited.

Cartwright said he worried about a “blurring of the line” between soldiers and spies if the Pentagon was put in charge of drone operations in sovereign countries “outside a declared area of hostility.”

Cartwright said mistakes, however rare, could do serious damage to America's reputation.

“We're seeing that blowback,” he said. “If you're trying to kill your way to a solution, no matter how precise you are, you're going to upset people even if they're not targeted.”

In recent months, several former top military and intelligence officials — including Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the former senior commander in Afghanistan, and Michael Hayden, the former CIA director — have sounded similar warnings about the Obama administration's reliance on drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen.

Cartwright's comments came amid a debate inside the Obama administration about bringing greater transparency to drone operations. But the effect of shifting drone operations to the Pentagon — a possibility first reported this week by the website The Daily Beast — would be blunted because a vast majority of the CIA's strikes have been carried out in Pakistan.

The CIA operates on its own in Pakistan, having carried out 365 strikes, by the count of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London, compared with about 45 in Yemen and a handful in Somalia.